“I’m hag-ridden,” he says, pretending to be mournful. “The only man in a houseful of women. They won’t let me into the bathroom in the morning to shave.” Mockingly, he invites my sympathy and collusion. But I can think of nothing to say.
Perdie says, “He should consider himself lucky that we put up with him.” She can get away with a little impertinence, with coltish liberties. She has the haircut for it. Mirrie, when hard-pressed, looks reproachful. Cordelia is not good at either of these things. But they all play up to him.
“What are you studying these days?” he says to me. It’s a usual question of his. Whatever I say amuses him.
“The atom,” I say.
“Ah, the atom,” he says. “I remember the atom. And what does the atom have to say for itself these days?”
“Which one?” I say, and he laughs.
“Which one, indeed,” he says. “That’s very good.” This may be what he wants: a give and take, of sorts. But Cordelia can never come up with it, because she’s too frightened of him. She’s frightened of not pleasing him. And yet he is not pleased. I’ve seen it many times, her dithering, fumble-footed efforts to appease him. But nothing she can do or say will ever be enough, because she is somehow the wrong person.
I watch this, and it makes me angry. It makes me want to kick her. How can she be so abject? When will she learn?
Cordelia fails the mid-year Zoology test. She doesn’t seem to care. She has spent half the exam time drawing surreptitious cartoons of various teachers in the school, which she shows to me on the way home, laughing her exaggerated laugh.
Sometimes I dream about boys. These are wordless dreams, dreams of the body. They stay with me for minutes after I wake up and I luxuriate in them, but I forget them soon. I have other dreams as well.
I dream that I can’t move. I can’t talk, I can’t even breathe. I’m in an iron lung. The iron is clenched around my body like a hard cylindrical skin. It’s this iron skin that is doing my breathing for me, in and out. I’m dense and heavy, I feel nothing other than this heaviness. My head sticks out the end of the iron lung. I’m looking up at the ceiling, on which there is a light fixture like yellowish cloudy ice. I dream that I’m trying on a fur collar, in front of the mirror on my bureau. There’s someone standing behind me. If I move so that I can see into the mirror, I’ll be able to look over my own shoulder without turning around. I’ll be able to see who it is.
I dream that I’ve found a red plastic purse, hidden in a drawer or trunk. I know there is treasure inside it, but I can’t get it open. I try and try and finally it bursts, like a balloon. It’s full of dead frogs. I dream that I’ve been given a head wrapped up in a white tea towel. I can see the outlines of the nose, the chin, the lips through the white cloth. I could unwrap the cloth to see whose head it is, but I don’t want to, because I know that if I do the head will come alive.
Chapter 45
Cordelia tells me that when she was younger she broke a thermometer and ate some of the mercury in it to make herself sick so she wouldn’t have to go to school. Or she’d stick her finger down her throat and throw up, or she’d hold the thermometer near a light bulb to make it look as if she had a temperature. Her mother caught her doing that because she left it near the light bulb too long and the mercury shot up to a hundred and ten. After that her other deceptions were harder to pull off.
“How old were you then?” I ask her.
“Oh, I don’t know. Before high school,” she tells me. “You know, the age when you do those things.”
It’s Tuesday, in the middle of May. We’re sitting in a booth at Sunnysides. Sunnysides has a soda fountain counter, which is speckled bloodstone red with chrome trim and has a row of round swivel-seat stools screwed to the floor along beside it. The black tops of the seats, which may not be leather, make a gentle farting sound when you sit down on them, so Cordelia and I and all girls prefer the booths. They’re dark wood, and the tabletop between the two facing benches is red like the soda fountain counter. This is where the Burnham students go after school to smoke and to drink glasses of Coca-Cola with maraschino cherries in them. If you drink a Coke and mix two aspirins in with it, it’s supposed to make you drunk. Cordelia says she has tried this; she says it’s nothing like being really drunk. Instead of Cokes, we’re drinking vanilla milkshakes, with two straws each. We ease the paper covers off the straws so that they pleat up into short caterpillars of paper. Then we drop water onto them out of our water glasses, and the paper caterpillars expand and look as if they’re crawling. The tables at Sunnysides are littered with strips of soggy paper.
“What did the chickens say when the hen laid an orange?” Cordelia says, because there is a wave of corny chicken jokes sweeping the school. Chicken jokes, and moron jokes. Why did the moron throw the clock out the window? To see time fly.
“Look at the orange marmalade,” I say in a bored voice. “What did the moron say when he saw the three holes in the ground?”
“What?” says Cordelia, who has trouble remembering jokes even when she’s heard them.
“Well, well, well,” I say.
“Ha ha,” says Cordelia. Part of this ritual is mild derision, of other people’s jokes. Cordelia doodles on the table, using our spilled water. “Remember those holes I used to dig?” she says.
“What holes?” I say. I don’t remember any holes.
“Those holes in my backyard. Boy, did I want a hole out there. I started one, but the ground was too hard, it was full of rocks. So I dug another one. I used to work away at it after school, day after day. I got blisters on my hands from the shovel.” She smiles a pensive, reminiscent smile.
“What did you want it for?” I ask.
“I wanted to put a chair in it and sit down there. By myself.”
I laugh. “What for?”
“I don’t know. I guess I wanted someplace that was all mine, where nobody could bug me. When I was little, I used to sit on a chair in the front hall. I used to think that if I kept very still and out of the way and didn’t say anything, I would be safe.”
“Safe from what?” I say.
“Just safe,” she says. “When I was really little, I guess I used to get into trouble a lot, with Daddy. When he would lose his temper. You never knew when he was going to do it. ”Wipe that smirk off your face,“
he would say. I used to stand up to him.” She squashes out her cigarette, which has been smoldering in the ashtray. “You know, I hated moving to that house. I hated the kids at Queen Mary’s, and those boring things like skipping. I didn’t really have any good friends there, except for you.”
Cordelia’s face dissolves, re-forms: I can see her nine-year-old face taking shape beneath it. This happens in an eyeblink. It’s as if I’ve been standing outside in the dark and a shade has snapped up, over a lighted window, revealing the life that’s been going on inside in all its clarity and detail. There is that glimpse, during which I can see. And then not.
A wave of blood goes up to my head, my stomach shrinks together, as if something dangerous has just missed hitting me. It’s as if I’ve been caught stealing, or telling a lie; or as if I’ve heard other people talking about me, saying bad things about me, behind my back. There’s the same flush of shame, of guilt and terror, and of cold disgust with myself. But I don’t know where these feelings have come from, what I’ve done.
I don’t want to know. Whatever it is, it’s nothing I need or want. I want to be here, in Tuesday, in May, sitting in the red-topped booth at Sunnysides, watching Cordelia as she delicately slurps the last of her milkshake up through the straws. She’s noticed nothing.